MilkyWay@home
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| Developer(s) | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute |
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| Development status | Active |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Platform | BOINC |
| Type | astroinformatics |
| License | GNU GPL v3 |
| Average performance | 360.030 TFLOPS |
| Active users | 16,508 |
| Total users | 194,514 |
| Active hosts | 23,523 |
| Total hosts | 411,915 |
| Website | milkyway |
MilkyWay@home is a volunteer distributed computing project in astrophysics running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. Using spare computing power from over 38,000 computers run by over 27,000 active volunteers as of November 2011[update], the MilkyWay@home project aims to generate accurate three-dimensional dynamic models of stellar streams in the immediate vicinity of the Milky Way. With SETI@home and Einstein@home, it is the third computing project of this type that has the investigation of phenomena in interstellar space as its primary purpose. Its secondary objective is to develop and optimize algorithms for distributed computing.
MilkyWay@home is a collaboration between the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's departments of Computer Science and Physics, Applied Physics and Astronomy and is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. It is operated by a team that includes astrophysicist Heidi Jo Newberg and computer scientists Malik Magdon-Ismail, Boleslaw Szymanski and Carlos A. Varela.
By mid-2009 the project's main astrophysical interest is in the Sagittarius Stream, a stellar stream emanating from the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy which partially penetrates the space occupied by the Milky Way and is believed to be in an unstable orbit around it, probably after a close encounter or collision with the Milky Way which subjected it to strong galactic tide forces. Mapping such interstellar streams and their dynamics with high accuracy is expected to provide crucial clues for understanding the structure, formation, evolution, and gravitational potential distribution of the Milky Way and similar galaxies. It could also provide insight on the dark matter issue. As the project evolves it might turn its attention to other starstreams.
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